Anita Anantharam
Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research, CLAS
Transnational Feminism
Transnational feminism is about the movement of goods, people, and capital across national boundaries. Transnational feminists are concerned with: the social, political and economic conditions that make up past empires and present ones; historical and contemporary systems of privilege and oppression, while paying special attention to the ways that gender intersects with race, class/caste, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and nationality; and how resistance to national/global movements are informed by local practices and indigenous knowledge systems.
Transnational Feminism is an integral part of the Women’s Studies major for undergraduate students and will soon become a core requirement for the Gender and Development Certificate Program (GAD) for Graduate students from across the disciplines at the University of Florida. As such, this course will most likely be offered each semester. This grant will be used to enhance the international focus of this course by adding two crucial components to the course: 1) historical sources, particularly laws that were passed in British and Dutch colonies of South and Southeast Asia pertaining to the regulation of women’s lives and women’s work; 2) contemporary case studies that document the successes and failures of women’s local organizing—on the grassroots level—that challenge western-centric notions of progress and development.
During the summer 2007, I plan to use this grant to travel to two places to meet with scholars and activists, and to collect primary source materials: 1) The British Library in London for information on British colonial policies pertaining to women in India; and 2) International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden.
Because globalization and development programs have often relied on and thrived on gender inequalities, this course is particularly interested in documenting the multiple ways in which women in South and Southeast Asia have resisted models of social control in both the colonial eras as well as today.